The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales Part 6

The girl, too, meant it quite seriously. In her tone was no trace of impudence. She had divined her adversary's secret, and thrust home the question with a kind of anxious honesty. Miss Bracy, red and gasping, tingling with shame, yet knew that she was not being exulted over.

She dropped the unequal fight between conventional argument and naked insight, and stood up, woman to woman. She neither denied nor exclaimed. She too told the truth.

"Never!"--she paused. "After what has happened I would never marry my cousin."

"I thought that, miss. You mean it, I am sure; and it eases my mind; because you have been a good mistress to me, and it would always have been a sorry thought that I'd stood in your way. Not that it would have prevented me."

"Do you still stand there and tell me that you will hold this unhappy boy to his word?"

"He's twenty-two, miss; my own age. Yes, I shall hold him to it."

"To save yourself!"

"No, miss."

"For his own sake, then?" Miss Bracy's laugh was pa.s.sing bitter.

"No, miss--though there might be something in that."

"For whose then?"

The girl did not answer. But in the silence her mistress understood, and moved to the door. She was beaten, and she knew it; beaten and unforgiving, In the doorway she turned.

"It is not for your own sake that you persist? It was not to gratify yourself--to be made a lady--that you plotted this? Very well; you shall be taken at your word. I cannot counsel Frank against his honour; if he insists, and you still accept the sacrifice, he shall marry you.

But from that hour--you understand?--you have seen the last of him.

I know Frank well enough to promise it."

She paused to let the words sink in and watch their effect. This was not only cruel, but a mistake; for it gave Ba.s.sett--who was past caring for it--the last word.

"If you do, miss," she said drearily, yet with a mind made up, "I daresay that will be best."

II.

Long before I heard this story I knew three of the characters in it.

Just within the harbour beside which I am writing this--on your left as you enter it from the sea--a little creek runs up past Battery Point to a stout sea-wall with a turfed garden behind it and a low cottage, and behind these a steep-sided valley, down which a stream tumbles to a granite conduit. It chokes and overflows the conduit, is caught again into a granite-covered gutter by the door of the cottage, and emerges beyond it in a small cascade upon the beach. At spring tides the sea climbs to the foot of this cascade, and great then is the splas.h.i.+ng.

The land-birds, t.i.ts and warblers, come down to the very edge to drink; but none of them--unless it be the wagtail--will trespa.s.s on the beach below. The rooks and gulls, on their side, never forage above the cascade, but when the ploughing calls them inland, mount and cross the frontier-line high overhead. All day long in summer the windows of the cottage stand open, and its rooms are filled with song; and night and day, summer and winter, the inmates move and talk, wake and sleep, to the contending music of the waters.

It had lain tenantless for two years, when one spring morning Miss Bracy and Mr. Frank Bracy arrived and took possession. They came (for aught we knew) out of nowhere; but they brought a good many boxes, six cats, and a complete set of new muslin blinds. On their way they purchased a quart of fresh milk, and Mr. Frank fed the cats while Miss Bracy put up the blinds. In the afternoon a long van arrived with a load of furniture; and we children who had gathered to watch were rewarded by a sensation when the van started by disgorging an artist's lay-figure, followed by a suit of armour. From these to a mahogany chest of drawers with bra.s.s handles was a sad drop, and we never regained the high romance of those first few minutes; but the furniture was undeniably handsome, and when Miss Bracy stepped out and offered us sixpence apiece to go and annoy somebody else, we came away convinced that our visitors were persons of exceptionally high rank. It puzzled us afterwards that, though a bargain is a bargain, not one of us had stayed to claim his sixpence.

The newcomers brought no servants; but after a week there arrived (also out of nowhere) an elderly and taciturn cook. Also, Miss Bracy on the third morning walked up to the farm at the head of the valley and hired down the hind's second daughter for a "help." We knew this girl, Lizzie Truscott, and waylaid her on her homeward road that evening for information. She told us that Miss Bracy's cats had a cradle apiece lined with muslin over pink calico; that the window curtains inside reached from the ceilings to the floors; that the number of knives and forks was something cruel--one kind for fish, another for meat, and a third for fruit; that in one of the looking-gla.s.ses a body could see herself at one time from head to feet, though why you should want a looking-gla.s.s to see your feet in when you could see them without was more than she knew; and, finally, that Miss Bracy had strictly forbidden her to carry tales--a behest which, convinced that Miss Bracy had dealings with the Evil One, she meant to observe. The elderly cook when she arrived warned us away from the door with a dialect we did not recognise. Her name (Lizzie reported) was Deborah, and in our haste we set her down for a Jewess; but I seem to have detected her accent since, and a few of her pet phrases, in the pages of Scottish fiction.

This is all I can tell--so fitful are childish memories--of the coming of Miss Bracy and Mr. Frank. I cannot say, for instance, what gossip it bred, or how soon they wore down the edge of it and became, with their eccentricities, an accepted feature of the spot they had made their home. They made no friends, no acquaintances: everyone knew of Miss Bracy's cats, but few had seen them. Miss Bracy herself was on view in church every Sunday morning, when Mr. Frank walked with her as far as the porch. He never entered the building, but took a country walk during service, returning in time to meet her at the porch and escort her home. His other walks he took alone, and almost always at night.

The policeman tramping towards Four Turnings after midnight to report to the country patrol would meet him and pause for a minute's chat.

Night-wandering beasts--foxes and owls and hedgehogs--knew his footstep and unlearned their first fear of it. Sometimes, but not often, you might surprise him of an afternoon seated before an easel in some out-of-the-way corner of the cliffs; but if you paused then to look, he too paused and seemed inclined to smudge out his work. The Vicar put it about that Mr. Frank had formerly been a painter of fame, and (being an astute man) one day decoyed him into his library, where hung an engraving of a picture "Amos Barton" by one F. Bracy. It had made a small sensation at Burlington House a dozen years before; and the Vicar liked it for the pathos of its subject--an elderly clergyman beside his wife's deathbed. To him the picture itself could have told little more than this engraving, which utterly failed to suggest the wonderful colour and careful work the artist (a young man with a theory and enthusiasm to back it) had lavished on the worn carpet and valances of the bed, as well as on the chestnut hair of the dying woman glorified in the red light of sunset.

Mr. Frank glanced up at the engraving and turned his face away.

It was the face of a man taken at unawares, embarra.s.sed, almost afraid.

The Vicar, who had been watching him, intending some pleasant remark about the picture, saw at once that something was wrong, and with great tact kept the talk upon some petty act of charity in which he sought to enlist his visitor's help. Mr. Frank listened, gave his promise hurriedly and made his escape. He never entered the Vicarage again.

III.

Eighteen years had pa.s.sed since Miss Bracy's interview with Ba.s.sett; and now, late on a summer afternoon, she and Mr. Frank were pacing the little waterside garden while they awaited their first visitor.

Mr. Frank betrayed the greater emotion, or at any rate the greater nervousness. Since breakfast he had been unable to sit still or to apply himself to any piece of work for ten minutes together, until Miss Bracy suggested the lawn-mower and brought purgatory upon herself.

With that lawn-mower all the afternoon he had been "rattling her brain to fiddle-strings"--as she put it--and working himself into a heat which obliged a change of clothes before tea. The tea stood ready now on a table which Deborah had carried out into the garden--dainty linen and silverware, and flowered china dishes heaped with cakes of which only Scotswomen know the secrets. The sun, dropping behind Battery Point, slanted its rays down through the pine-trunks and over the fiery ma.s.sed plumes of rhododendrons. Scents of jasmine and of shorn gra.s.s mingled with the clean breath of the sea borne to the garden wall on a high tide tranquil and clear--so clear that the eye following for a hundred yards the lines of the cove could see the feet of the cliffs where they rested, three fathoms down, on lily-white sand. Miss Bracy adored these clean depths. She had missed much that life could have given; but at least she had found a life comely and to her mind. She had sacrificed much; but at times she forgot how much in contemplating the modest elegance of the altar.

She wore, this evening, a gown of purplish silk, with a light cashmere scarf about her shoulders. Nothing could make her a tall woman; but her grey hair, dressed high _a l'imperatrice_, gave her dignity at least, and an air of old-fas.h.i.+oned distinction. And she was one of those few and fortunate ladies who never need to worry about the appearance of their cavaliers. Mr. Frank--six feet of him, without reckoning a slight stoop--always satisfied the eye; his grey flannel suit fitted loosely but fitted well; his wide-brimmed straw hat was as faultless as his linen; his necktie had a negligent neatness; you felt sure alike and at once of his bootmaker and his s.h.i.+rtmaker; and his fresh complexion, his prematurely white hair, his strong well-kept hands, completed the impression of cleanliness for its own sake, of a careful physical cult as far as possible removed from foppery.

This may have been in Miss Bracy's mind when she began: "I daresay he will be fairly presentable, to look at. That unfortunate woman had at least an art of dressing--a quiet taste too, quite extraordinary in one of her station. I often wondered where she picked it up."

Mr. Frank winced. Until the news of his wife's death came, a fortnight ago, her name had not been spoken between them for years. That he and his cousin regarded her very differently he knew; but while silence was kept it had been possible to ignore the difference. Now it surprised him that speech should hurt so; and, at the same moment, that his cousin should not divine how sorely it hurt. After all _he_ was the saddest evidence of poor Ba.s.sett's "lady-like" tastes.

"I suppose you know nothing of the school she sent him to?" Miss Bracy went on--"King William's, or whatever it is."

"King Edward's," Mr. Frank corrected. "Yes, I made inquiries about it at the time--ten years ago. People speak well of it. Not a public school, of course--at least, not quite; the line isn't so easy to draw nowadays--but it turns out gentlemen."

In her heart Miss Bracy thought him too hopeful; but she said, "He wrote a becoming letter--his hand, by the way, curiously suggests yours; it was quite a nice letter, and agreeably surprised me.

I shouldn't wonder if his headmaster had helped him with it and cut out the boyish heroics; for of course _she_ must have taught him to hate us."

"My dear Laura, why in the world--" began Mr. Frank testily.

"Oh, she had spirit!"--the encounter of long ago rose up in Miss Bracy's memory, and she nodded her head with conviction. "Like most of the quiet ones, she had spirit. You don't suppose, I imagine, that she forgave?"

"No." Mr. Frank came to a halt and dug with his heel at a daisy root in the turf. Then using his heel as a pivot he swung himself round in an awkward circle. The action was ludicrous almost, but he faced his cousin again with serious eyes. "But it is not her heart that I doubt,"

he added gently.

Miss Bracy stared up at him, "My dear Frank, do you mean to tell me that you _regret_?"

Yes; as a fact he did regret, and knew that he would never cease to regret. He was not a man to nurse malice even for a wrong done to him, still less to live carelessly conscious of having wronged another.

He was weak, but incurably just. And more; though self entered last into his regret, he knew perfectly well that the wrong had wrecked him too. His was a career _manque_: he had failed as a man, and it had broken his nerve as an artist. He was a dabbler now, with--as Heine said of de Musset--a fine future _behind him_, and none but an artist can tell the bitterness of that self-knowledge. Had he kept his faith with Ba.s.sett in spirit as in letter, he might have failed just as decidedly; her daily companions.h.i.+p might have coa.r.s.ened his inspiration, soured him, driven him to work cheaply, recklessly; but at least he could have accused fate, circ.u.mstance, a boyish error, whereas now he and his own manhood shared the defeat and the responsibility. Yes, he regretted; but it would never do to let Laura know his regret.

That would be to play the double traitor. She had saved him (she believed) from himself; with utterly wrong-headed loyalty she had devoted her life to this. The other debt was irredeemable, but this at any rate could be paid.

He evaded her question. "My dear," he said, "what was done has been atoned for by her, and is being atoned for by--by us. Let us think of her without bitterness."

Miss Bracy shook her head "I am a poor sort of Christian," she confessed; "and if she has taught this boy to hate us--"

"Mr. Victor Bracy," announced Deborah from the garden-porch behind them, and a tall youth in black stepped past her and came across the turf with a shy smile.

The pair turned with an odd sense of confusion, almost of dismay.

They were prepared for the "Victor," but somehow they had not thought of him as bearing their own surname. Mr. Frank had felt the shock once before, in addressing an envelope; but to Miss Bracy it was quite new.

Yet she was the first to recover herself, and, while holding out her hand, took quick note that the boy had Frank's stature and eyes, carried his clothes well, and himself, if shyly, without clumsiness. She could find no fault with his manner of shaking hands; and when he turned to his father, the boy's greeting was the less embarra.s.sed of the two.

Mr. Frank indeed had suddenly become conscious of his light suit and bird's-eye neckcloth.